Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which backs the Fight for $15, told Fortune that child care workers protesting alongside fast-food workers illustrates a dual crisis: underpaid working parents are struggling to pay for child care and those who care for others’ children are struggling to take care of their own.

“If you look back over the last 25 years, we’ve learned so much about early childhood development. We have a 21st century set of expectations [about childhood development], but in many ways we still have a 20th century view of work and pay structure [for child care workers],” says Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley. “There’s a gap between the expectations and promise of early childhood and the way we think about the people who do the work.”

That gap is putting the quality of child care at risk. Research points to wages as a key factor in the retention of high-qualified teachers, which, in turn, is the best predictor of whether a child care center maintains quality over time.

Low wages inflict additional harm on the individuals who are providing the care.

Corrine Hall, a 53-year-old from Raleigh, North Carolina who has worked in child care for 30 years, told Fortune she currently earns $8.25 per hour serving as a substitute caregiver at various child care centers. She was laid off from a full-time job two years ago. In the three decades she has worked in the field, she’s never earned more than $13 per hour. Her low wages forced her to use food stamps earlier in her career as she cared for two daughters by herself. She has little savings for retirement. “I don’t have anything to fall back on. Hopefully social security will be around. Other than that and my family, that’s pretty much all I have,” she says.

Hall is far from alone in her reliance on public assistance. In 2012, 46% of child care workers—versus 25% of the nationwide total workforce—was a member of a family enrolled in at least one of four public support programs: the Federal Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, according to a 2014 study by the Berkeley Center.

Underlying the wage issue is the high cost of child care itself, which makes industry workers’ poor pay all the more surprising. For parents, full-time infant care costs—on average—between $4,560 and $16,549 per year, depending on the state and child care center setting. For a four-year-old, it ranges from $4,039 to $12,320. The Berkeley Center’s analysis shows that there’s been a two-fold increase in the cost to parents for early childhood services since 1997. At the same time, child care workers have experienced no increase in real earnings, even as payroll and related expenses make up 80% of the cost of a child care program.

Where is the increased cost of child care going, if not to workers? Deborah Phillips, a professor of developmental and child psychology at Georgetown University who worked on the 2014 Berkeley study, put it bluntly: “We have no idea.”

Phillips surmises that the increased expense could be related to the growth of for-profit childcare centers.

Meanwhile, Rachel Demma, policy director at the Early Care and Education Consortium, which represents child care centers, says most for-profit providers make very little profit and, like their non-profit counterparts, spend the lion’s share of their revenue on staffing expenses. She said the growing cost of child care could be due to fluctuations in state reimbursement rates to providers that serve needy families. M-A Lucas, director of the Consortium, points to stricter caregiver-to-child ratios and the increased prevalence of labor-intensive infant care as two potential reasons for the skyrocketing costs and stagnant worker pay.

The answer to a second question may be just as hard to pin down: who will pay for child care workers’ higher wages?

There’s little disagreement that parents are already paying enough. Lucas says she’s concerned about the wages of the child care workforce, but her organization’s stance is to “advocate for policies that won’t shift the burden of increased program costs to families.”

Whitebook from the Berkeley Center says early childhood education should be a public good. “Like public education, not everyone has to use it, but it should be there.”

In addition to Salesforce’s boycott of Indiana, the state’s hot-button law also received condemnation from other folks with business ties to the state.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) said it would boycott the state if the “religious freedom” bill passed. In a letter sent to Pence on Wednesday, the group that’s been headquartered in Indianapolis for nearly 100 years threatened to move its general conference and its 6,000 attendees from Indianapolis, where it’s scheduled to take place in 2017.

The backlash from business is reminiscent of opposition by some businesses to a similar bill in Arizona last year. Governor Jan Brewer eventually vetoed the legislation after it received harsh criticism from the likes of Delta Air Lines, the Super Bowl host committee, and Major League Baseball.

Benioff’s vocal criticism of the “religious freedom” bill is in line with his reputation in Silicon Valley as a philanthropist and advocate for social good. While his company’s stance on Indiana’s new law is clear, what’s less certain is how the cloud computing company conducts business in other jurisdictions that discriminate against the LGBT community. When Fortune asked if the company applies or plans to apply its stance toward Indiana to other regions that discriminate against or persecute LGBT individuals—such as some countries in the Middle East and Russia—a Salesforce spokeswoman said the company wasn’t—at that time—commenting beyond Benioff’s tweets.

With its “religious freedom” bill becoming law Thursday, Indiana is the first state to enact the measure that been introduced in several others. According to the Human Rights Campaign, lawmakers are considering similar bills in Arkansas, Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

The Human Rights Campaign says that the bills go beyond marriage equality and “risk undermining, even crippling, fundamental protections and basic dignity for LGBT Americans and other minority groups.” The group says that the legislation would, for example, allow an evangelical police officer to refuse to patrol a Jewish street festival or “an EMT could claim the law is on his side after refusing service to a dying transgender person in the street.”

Some of the proposed bills have already petered out because of business pushback.

UPS loses Supreme Court pregnancy discrimination case

In a move that bucks the reputation it has developed under Chief Justice John Roberts, the United States Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled 6-3 in favor of a working American in her case against a giant corporation.

The majority opinion—authored by Justice Stephen Breyer, who was joined by Justices Roberts, Ruth Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Samuel Alito—found that Peggy Young, a former UPS truck driver, had the right to sue UPS for pregnancy discrimination after the shipping company refused to give her a less demanding shift when a medical professional ordered her to not lift heavy items while pregnant.

Katherine Kimpel, a lawyer at Sanford Heisler who specializes in gender and race discrimination and who filed an amicus brief in support of Young in the case, said the decision was a “win for working women and working mothers.” The court ruled that it “was not going to insulate corporate interests from accountability,” she said. Sam Bagenstos, the lawyer who argued Young’s case before the Supreme Court, said in a statement that, with Wednesday’s ruling, “the Court recognized that employers can’t put pregnancy in a class by itself.”

UPS said in a statement that it’s confident that lower courts “will find that UPS did not discriminate against Ms. Young under [the Supreme Court’s] newly announced standard.”(The Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of Young’s case; it bumped the case back down to the Fourth Circuit, which will rule on whether or not UPS engaged in discrimination.)

The case stems from a lawsuit filed by Young in October 2008 that accused UPS of violating the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. In 2002, Young took on a part-time role with UPS as a truck driver, picking up air shipments. Four years later, she took a leave of absence to receive in vitro fertilization. When she became pregnant and a midwife instructed her not to lift packages over 20 pounds, Young asked to return to UPS to do either light duty or her regular job as a truck driver, which seldom required her to lift heavy boxes. According to Young’s Supreme Court petition, her manager told her that UPS offered light duty to workers who sustained on-the-job injuries, employees with ailments covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act, and those who had lost Department of Transportation certification because of physical aliments like sleep apnea; not—the manager said—to pregnant workers.

UPS wouldn’t allow Young to return to her former role either since her lifting restriction made her a liability. Young was required to go on extended, unpaid leave, during which she lost her medical coverage. She returned to work as a driver about two months after her baby was born.

Young lost two previous rulings in her case against UPS. A district court decided in February 2011 that UPS’s decision not to accommodate Young was “gender-neutral.” The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals later affirmed that decision, ruling UPS had established a “pregnancy-blind policy.”

In October, UPS changed its policy for pregnant workers. This year, it started offering temporary light duty to pregnant workers who need it. Despite the reversal, UPS maintains that its denial of Young’s light duty request was lawful at the time and that its policy change is voluntary and not required by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. The Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus brief supporting UPS, calling attention to companies that offer pregnant employees “more than what federal law compels them to provide.”

The Supreme Court likely took up Young’s case because it raises the larger question of how to interpret the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978. One portion of the statute has been especially troublesome: a line that says employers must treat pregnant women the same as “other persons not so affected [by pregnancy] but similar in their ability or inability to work.”

Young’s legal team has argued that the statute means that as long as an employer accommodates a subset of workers with disabilities, pregnant workers who are similarly unable to work must receive the same treatment.

UPS, meanwhile, has gone with the interpretation that so long as a policy is pregnancy-neutral—which often means considering pregnancy the same way they would an off-the-job injury that garners no special treatment—an employer is safe from discrimination claims.

In his opinion, Justice Breyer didn’t agree entirely with either side. “We doubt that Congress intended to grant pregnant workers an unconditional most-favored-nation status.” At the same time, he wrote, “UPS says that the second clause [of the Act] simply defines sex discrimination to include pregnancy discrimination. But that cannot be so.”

The court did not issue a rigid rule that will dictate when an employer must make accommodations for a pregnant worker. Instead, Justice Breyer left a bit of wiggle room. He wrote, in essence, that if an employer is going to not accommodate a pregnant woman while accommodating other employees “similar in their ability or inability to work,” the employer must have a “legitimate, non-discriminatory reason” for doing so.

In their dissent, Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas said the justices in the majority went beyond the intent of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and imposed new requirements on employers.

Pregnancy discrimination cases are on the rise. In fiscal year 2013, 5,342 pregnancy discrimination charges were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commissions and state and local Fair Employment Practices agencies, up from 3,900 in 1997.

While Wednesday’s ruling wasn’t as big of a win for employees as it could have been, it did set somewhat more stringent guidelines for how employers must treat pregnant workers. “If employers accommodate other people [with similar physical limitations] and not pregnant employees, there better be a really good explanation for that,” Kimpel says.

After Germanwings plane crash, is Lufthansa’s ‘great success’ in jeopardy?

When Fortune spoke with Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr in November, the company had just scaled back its earnings targets due to a weaker global economy and overcapacity. The German airline is being squeezed on short-haul flights by discount carriers like Easyjet and Ryan Air and by booming Middle Eastern carriers on long-haul routes. It’s been also been plagued by pilot strikes, which have cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

But when surveying his airline’s overall operations, the CEO, who’d been on the job just six months at the time of his conversation with Fortune, pointed to its discount arm Germanwings as a bright spot.

“Our low cost subsidiary Germanwings [has] been a great success; bigger than we expected,” he said. Indeed, Lufthansa is in the process of shifting more of its European traffic from its flagship brand to Germanwings and its other discount subsidiary, Eurowings, because of their lower operating costs. Spohr told Fortune that he expected Germanwings—which launched in 2002—to be profitable in 2015. “It very much looks like we will be meeting that target.”

On Tuesday, it was easy to wonder if that still holds true.

An Airbus A320 jetliner operated by Germanwings crashed in the French Alps on its way from Barcelona to Dusseldorf on Tuesday morning. All 150 people on board are presumed dead.

Spohr Tweeted on Tuesday that it was a “dark day” for Lufthansa. The company said on its website, “Everyone at Germanwings and Lufthansa is deeply shocked and saddened by these events. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and friends of the passengers and the crew members.”

When asked about the business implications of the crash, a Lufthansa spokeswoman said that its highest priority was conducting a full investigation of the crash and providing the families and friends of the plane’s passengers and crew with “all the care and assistance they need.”

Shares of Lufthansa dipped as much as 4.6% in European trading on Tuesday and closed 1.7% lower.

When such airline catastrophes occur, there’s always speculation about what it will mean for the businesses involved for the long-term. Robert Mann, an industry consultant and a former airline executive, says that most plane crashes, as tragic and headline-grabbing as they may be, “have very little impact on a carrier’s ongoing business.”

There are a few exceptions, mainly in cases where “there is an indication of systemic issues or incompetence.” Mann points to ValuJet as an example of a carrier that was wrecked by the latter.

In 1996, ValuJet Flight 592 caught fire shortly after takeoff and crashed into the Florida Everglades, killing all 110 passengers that were on board. An investigation into the crash determined that a ValuJet subcontractor that had illegally loaded oxygen tanks into the plane’s cargo hold was responsible for the tragedy “It’s ironic, since it wasn’t even ValuJet’s fault; it just happened to use a vendor who was incompetent,” Mann says.

But still, ValuJet couldn’t shake the scrutiny and fallout from the tragedy. After the Federal Aviation Administration grounded all ValuJet planes, the carrier eventually returned to the air with a reduced fleet, but it never rebuilt its customer base and ultimately merged with the smaller AirTran Airways, which is now a part of Southwest Airlines.

Then there’s Malaysia Airlines, which saw a drastic drop-off in passengers following the disappearance of Flight 370 in March 2014 and the fatal downing of Flight 17 in Ukraine in July. The Malaysian government took the airline private in August in an attempt to restore its financial health.

Based on reports of Tuesday’s plane crash, it’s not clear what caused the Germanwings aircraft to go down. Mann notes that Lufthansa services its Germanwings fleet, alongside the rest of its planes, at Lufthansa Technik, one of the airline industry’s largest maintenance providers. Lufthansa’s last fatal accident occurred 20 years ago, and Germanwings’ safety record was perfect until Tuesday.

Lufthansa is “a quality organization”, Mann says. The value of that attribute can’t be overstated. Every airline passenger is after a good price, but “the one thing people will not trade away is safety,” he says.

While retailers should be commended for paying workers more, the pile-on has brought attention to a key group of low-wage employers that have been noticeably absent from the discussion. Traditional fast-food restaurants haven’t made a peep.

That’s not to say fast-food employers have been free of pressure from their workers and the public to bump up wages. The so-called Fight for 15 campaign has repeatedly hounded fast-food chains—most notably, McDonald’s—for their low pay, erratic hours, and most recently poor workplace safety.

While worker advocates will tell you there’s no excuse for the fast-food giants’ wage policies, a few facts help explain why retailers have been able to move faster on the issue.

“Generally speaking, if Target or Wal-Mart raises [wages] to $9 or $10, the labor cost increase that it entails is smaller than if McDonald’s or Burger King did the same,” says Arindrajit Dube, an associate professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Those labor costs figures also mean that retailers can more easily pass wage increases along to customers if they wish, since worker pay represents a smaller portion of all goods sold.

Franchises lose battle to halt Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law

In another win for the minimum wage movement, the International Franchise Association and a handful of franchise owners on Tuesday lost a court battle to stop Seattle from hiking its minimum wage to $15 per hour.

The IFA vowed on Wednesday to keep fighting the law that approved the wage boost, which they say discriminates against the city’s small franchise businesses.

The decision on Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Richard Jones to let Seattle’s minimum wage to go ahead as planned stems from a lawsuit filed in August by the International Franchise Association and five local franchisees, who argued that the $15 per hour law would irreparably harm franchisees and put them at a competitive disadvantage.

The lawsuit didn’t challenge the $15 minimum wage law in its entirety; just the provision of the legislation that treats hotel and fast food franchises differently than other small, local businesses simply because they’re associated with big corporations. The law requires employers with more than 500 workers to adopt the $15 per hour wage by 2017 or by 2018 if they offer health care benefits. Franchise businesses—even though they employ fewer than 500 workers—must abide by the large employer deadline if they’re affiliated with big brands. Meanwhile, businesses with fewer than 500 employees have until 2021 to reach the $15 level.

Paul Clement, the attorney representing the franchise association, told Judge Jones during a hearing on the issue last week that Seattle’s law violated the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution because it treats franchises differently than other local small businesses just because of their association with nationwide chains.

Clement, best known for arguing before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of conservative clients, told Fortune in August that the Seattle law also violated franchises’ First Amendment rights since the legislation’s less favorable treatment of franchises is based on the marketing and advertising efforts those businesses share with national franchise companies. “And of course marketing and advertising is speech,” he said. Clement did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday.

In defending the law, the city of Seattle said it decided to classify franchisees as large employers because they have access to the economic resources of larger companies, which would allow them to bump workers’ pay faster than independent small businesses. Seattle Assistant City Attorney Greg Narver also argued that the plaintiffs couldn’t show that franchise restaurants and hotels would suffer irreparable harm because of the differential treatment.

Judge Jones on Tuesday sided with the city after finding that franchise owners and their industry group hadn’t adequately shown that Seattle intended to discriminate against them and that there was no credible evidence that indicates franchises would shut down or reduce operations because of the law.

In its appellate brief, the NCAA argued that the commercial pressures of college sports present the risk that “an avocation will become a profession and that athletics will become untethered from the academic experience.” It goes on to say that its “amateurism rules are legitimate—and procompetitive—because they fundamentally define college athletics by ensuring that the players are students and not professionals.”

The hearing Tuesday will be the latest chapter in the antitrust case brought by former UCLA basketball star Ed O’Bannon and 19 other college athletes in 2009. At a three-week trial in June, the players argued that the NCAA is a cartel whose rules make colleges and universities wealthy while athletes receive little to none of the money made from licensing their names and images. Several players who testified at trial said that playing sports was their main occupation at college; that the hours they spent training and at games made it difficult—if not impossible—for them to function like ordinary students. O’Bannon said at trial that he spent about 40-45 hours a week on basketball and about 12 hours on schoolwork. “I was an athlete masquerading as a student,” he said.

The NCAA defended its current system as a way to ensure a competitive balance among schools. It argued that the money it makes from profitable sports is used to fund athletic programs that lack lucrative television deals.

In August, U.S. District Court Judge Claudia Wilken ruled in favor of O’Bannon and the other plaintiffs, finding that the NCAA rules at issue in the case “unreasonably restrain trade in the market for certain educational and athletic opportunities offered by NCAA Division I schools.” The NCAA’s justification for its system “does not justify this restraint and could be achieved through less restrictive means” while still preserving competitiveness, Wilken said.

In addition to the O’Bannon case, the NCAA faces another threat to its current operating system that also stems from concerns over the exploitation of college athletes.

At the moment, it’s nearly impossible to wipe out student loans in personal bankruptcy; it’s only allowed in extremely rare circumstances. That’s thanks in part to a change in the federal bankruptcy code in 2005 that shielded private loans from being discharged in bankruptcy. A similar protection for government-issued or guaranteed loans had been in place since 1978. The bill introduced Thursday seeks to reverse those 2005 changes so borrowers can once again get rid of private loans in bankruptcy.

“Too many Americans are carrying around mortgage-sized student loan debt that forces them to put off major life decisions like buying a home or starting a family. We can no longer sit by while this student debt bomb keeps ticking,” Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and a co-sponsor of the bill, said in a statement.

To be clear, if the bill defies the long odds it faces in a Republican-controlled Congress and becomes law, it will cover only a small chunk of student loans. Private banks issue about 10% of all student loans and only those would be eligible for discharge in bankruptcy. The federal government issues the remaining 90% of student loans and they would remain relatively untouchable.

Even still, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau pegs total student loan debt at $1.2 trillion—more than the nationwide balances for credits cards and auto loans—or about $30,000 per student on average. Of that, $165 billion stems from private loans. Student loans made by banks are an obvious target for the Obama administration because they often lack the lower interest rates, consumer protections, and repayment options that accompany loans issued by the government. In 2012, at least 850,000 private student loans equaling $8 billion were in default, according to the CFPB.

After an epic compromise, Utah will be the 19th state to ban LGBT workplace discrimination

Utah—a state known for its large, conservative, Mormon population—made the uncharacteristic move Wednesday night of passing a bill to protect the workplace and housing rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Governor Gary Herbert, a Republican, is expected to sign the legislation Thursday evening.

The bill will prohibit employers from discriminating in the workplace against people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. At the same time, the legislation accounts for religious freedom by exempting religious organizations from the anti-LGBT discrimination rule and by shielding employees from being fired for speaking out about their religious and moral convictions.

One gaping hole in the bill is its failure to address whether a business can deny customers service because of religious preferences.

Support for the bill from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which opposes same-sex marriage, was critical to the legislation’s passage since it gave members of the Utah legislature—most of whom are Mormon—the go-ahead to vote for the bill.

When the bill becomes law, Utah will be the 22nd state to prohibit discrimination of gay and lesbian people in the workplace, and the 19th to ban bias based on gender identity. Not including Utah’s soon-to-be law, here’s where states stand on the issue, according to the American Civil Liberties Union:

There’s no doubt about it; chauffeuring and taxi driving is overwhelmingly male. Women, it seems, just don’t want to be your cabbie.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014, of the 383,000 workers in the taxi driver and chauffeur occupation nationwide, 12.7% were women. Looking back over the last 12 years of data, that percentage has hardly budged. It was 12.4% in 2002, hit 16% in 2006, but then inched its way back down to the current level. In New York City, where more than 50,000 drivers sat behind the wheel of the city’s taxis in 2014, women made up just 1% of drivers. In September, SheTaxis, an app-based car service by women, for women, delayed the launch of its operations on account of a female driver shortage.

Compared to those rates, Uber actually has a leg up. Of its 160,000 drivers in the United States, 14% are female, according to the company.

But attracting more women will be tough, says Graham Hodges, a Colgate University history professor and the author of Taxi!: A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver, since taxi driving “has always been a male purview.”

Uber says it will achieve its 1 million female driver goal by “invest[ing] in long-term programs in local communities,” but it did not immediately respond to a request to explain what those programs will entail.

It’s difficult to identify a specific explanation for the dearth of women taxi drivers. Hodges points to the lingering effects of a historical notion that a city’s streets “are very much a male arena.”

“There were instances in the pre-Civil War era when women walking on the street were arrested because police presumed they were prostitutes,” he notes. “That changed a bit with the introduction of the Ladies Mile [shopping district] and with more liberated women in the 1910s and 1920s.” But even today, Hodges says, “taxi driving is considered a low-prestige, somewhat dangerous occupation. You’re dealing with the public at its worst; they’re often drunk, abusive, or try to skip out on fares.”

To make a living as a taxi driver, you need to work the job full-time, Desai says. By her estimates, taxi drivers in New York City work an average of 60 hours per week—that kind of commitment could pose a challenge for a working mother. The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission says the average driver shift is 9.5 hours. The small number of female taxi drivers “speaks to the fact that we live in a world where raising children still falls on the shoulders of women,” says Desai.

In a video that accompanied its announcement on Tuesday, Uber touted its drivers’ flexible hours and entrepreneurial opportunities as big upsides for women. But just like driving a traditional taxi, it’s still a job where the fundamental duty involves picking up strangers—alone—and inviting them into your car. It’s a task that’s unappealing at its core, Hodges says, and it can be especially so to women who are perceived to be more vulnerable to harassment or attack.

In explaining men’s dominance of the taxi driving field, Hodges also points to the large number of immigrants who take to the profession. In New York City in 2014, about 95% of taxi drivers were born outside of the United States. More than a fifth of drivers hail from Bangladesh; about 13% were born in Pakistan. He surmises that some of those drivers may have emigrated to the United States to support family members in home countries where a man is expected to be the primary breadwinner.

Desai of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance takes issue with such assumptions. She says that her Alliance has female members from the Nepalese community who are driving taxis in New York City to earn money for their spouses and children back home.

Once upon a time, female cab drivers did have a kind of heyday. During World War II—like they did in so many professions—women assumed the roles of taxi drivers because there were very few men available to do the job, Hodges says. But once men returned from war, women handed over the keys.